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Comment by donniezazen | Hacker News Reader

Can't get it to work on Fedora 20. Are you suppose to press and hold Ctrl, Alt, PrtSc(SysRq), r, e, i, s, u, and b all together? Does it have to be in that order?

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Switch to a terminal (Ctrl+Alt+F2) and do AltGr+PrtScr+H - if you've got Magic SysReq enabled that will print the help information (a list of commands with their (k)eycodes) to the terminal. If it doesn't print anything then you need to RTFM to find out how to enable it. AFAIR I had to do this shortly after I switched to Kubuntu as it was disabled by default - I often had to use Ctrl+Alt+Backspace or AltGr+SysRq+K to kill X as there's a hardware bug on my Nvidia graphics card.

My 8yo has a mnemonic for it something about Elephants and Umbrellas but I've always done reissub (now with extra sync'ing power). For a time the process for him was login, Alt+F2, konsole, Ctrl+R, mine, Enter, AltGr+SysRq+R, E, I, S, U, B; then repeat the first part and you're finally ready to play Minecraft!

If AltGr is right Alt, it does print a bunch of stuff. On my system, SysRq is under PrtSc. Does that mean I have to do Fn+PrtSc to get SysRq or just PrtSc is enough.

If it prints out without presssing Fn then you're doing it right. Laptop keyboards are weird but usually it's just the PrtScr key as it acts as SysRq when using the Alt[Gr] modifier.

It should print something like:

"SysRq : HELP : loglevel(0-9) reboot(b) [...]"

You'll have to enable it first (http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/QA/Sysrq )

    sysctl -w kernel.sysrq = 1

Stuff kernel.sysrq = 1 in /etc/sysctl to make it permanent.

I do not really understand why it isn't enabled by default though...

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